KEEPING FIT. Orison Swett Marden

is easily digested and contains considerable phosphorus, and very nutritive minerals, such as iron. The brains of animals are rich in phosphorus and quite easily digested.

      Many so-called harmless stimulants, like coffee and tea, make people irritable, and if taken in excess cause permanent injury by the constant enlargement of the blood vessels in the brain. This is due to a temporary paralysis of the nerves in the muscular fibres of the blood vessels, so that they lose their tonicity, and are powerless to restrict the blood flow. All alcoholic stimulants have a similar effect. It is this excess of blood which increases the brain activity, thus producing for a time a feeling of well being, a kind of mental exaltation. But this feeling, as everybody who uses stimulants knows, always has an injurious reaction.

      Because tea and coffee produce uric acid in the system some food authorities prohibit them, when all other things which are known to generate it are excluded; but, as a small amount of uric acid is always developed, it is doubtful whether total exclusion of these beverages is absolutely necessary. In certain individual cases of course it is. Cocoa, however, is much more healthful than either. It is also a very mild stimulant and valuable article of food. It is more easily digested than either tea or coffee and less exciting to the nervous system. Chocolate is made of cocoa and a large quantity of sugar, and really is more a food than a drink.

      It would be impossible in the space of a chapter, or in a book of ordinary size, for that matter, to name all the different kinds of food and discuss their qualities and effects. The foregoing is merely meant to be suggestive to those who have not made some study of the food question.

      The vast amount of ignorance that exists on this question is sometimes tragically, sometimes amusingly illustrated. As an instance of the latter, I know of a French baker who became so fat that he was ashamed to appear on the street because people made so much fun of him. He got so he could not raise his hand to his head to put on his hat. Fortunately for him, some one who knew something about the chemistry of digestion asked him why he did not drop his carbonaceous, fat-producing food and eat nitrogenous food, such as meat, eggs, cheese, etc., and take a great deal of exercise. He acted upon this suggestion, and in a very-short time was perfectly normal again.

      I know people who have a perfect terror of their increasing fat who nevertheless continue to eat carbonaceous food and take very little exercise. Yet if the sugars and starches and fats are not burned in the combustion of the body the fat cells will accumulate. How many women are lamenting their increasing fleshiness and resorting to all sorts of drugs to get rid of it; whereas, if they knew the simple laws of the chemistry of food they could largely regulate their weight.

      Health is, indeed, so necessary to all the duties as well as pleasures of life that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly; and he that, for a short gratification brings weakness and disease upon himself, and for the pleasure of a few years passed in the tumults of diversion and clamors of merriment, condemns the maturer and more experienced part of his life to the chamber and the couch, may be justly reproached, not only as a spendthrift of his happiness, but also as a robber of the public—as a wretch that has voluntarily disqualified himself for the business of his station and refused that part which Providence assigns him in the general task of human nature.—Samuel Johnson.